A portal is a point of access to data and applications that provides a unified and personalized view of information and resources. Typically, a portal is implemented as one or more pages on a website. In addition to web content, portals provide the ability to display portlets—self-contained applications or content. A portlet has configuration information associated with it that determines how the portlet's graphical user interface (GUI) is rendered and to what extent a user can interact with the GUI. Generally speaking, such configuration information can be stored in a proprietary database accessible only by a Web server or specialized tools. However, this can limit a user's ability to modify and distribute such data. What is needed is a standard way to represent portlet configuration information so that a portlet can be manipulated and rendered by non propriety tools.